A legible & concise status badge solution for third-party codebase services. Soon to be Retina-ready.
An increasing number of GitHub repos sport badges for things like:
- Travis CI build status:
- Gemnasium dependency checks:
- RubyGems released gem version:
As you can see from the zoomed 400% versions of these badges above, nobody is (really) using the same badge file and at normal size, they're hardly legible. Worst of all, they're completely inconsistent. The information provided isn't of the same kind on each badge. The context is blurry, which doesn't make for å straightforward understanding of how these badges are relevant to the project they're attached to and what information they provide.
As you can see below, without increasing the footprint of these badges, I've tried to increase legibility and coherence, removing useless text to decrease the horizontal length in the (likely) scenario that more of these badge thingies crop up on READMEs all across the land.
Thanks to @ackerdev we also have SVG equivalents of all existing badges if you would like your badges to be Retina-ready or dynamically manipulate the text inside of them before you output them to PNG 24 Alpha (transparent background).
- legible: it should be as easy to read the metadata provided by a badge as it is to read body copy inside of a README file regardless of display resolution
- semantic: the purpose information provided by a badge should be self-evident
- non-promotional: badges should not advertise but instead provide value through information
- concise: one descriptive word on the left (the key), one piece of data on the right (the value)
- hyperlinked: badges can link to a third-party website providing more information, either related to the metadata provided by the badge or about the project the badge was used for (e.g. an open source library)
The design of our badges has been carefully considered to provide sufficient padding between the container badge and the text within. Badges should never have a fixed width. The letter spacing (or kerning) is deliberate and focused on clarity, so is the use of the Open Sans font face. Contrary to widely available web-safe alternative sans-serif fonts like Arial (a sloppy Helvetica ripoff) and Verdana (a sloppy Futura ripoff), OpenSans remains highly legible at very small sizes which is why it was chosen.
You can find a copy (including its Apache license) of Open Sans in the font/ directory of this repository.
When it comes to color choices, the focus is on clear contrast between the text and the background color on both sides of the badge (key and value). The two sides are also contrasted with each other with the key side always retaining a dark grey color for consistency, and the value side taking on whichever background color better conveys the meaning of the data provided (e.g. green for a successful build, red for a failed build).
What kind of meta data can you convey using badges?
- test build status:
build | failing - code coverage percentage:
coverage | 80% - stable release version:
version | 1.2.3 - package manager release:
gem | 1.2.3 - status of third-party dependencies:
dependencies | out-of-date - static code analysis GPA:
code climate | 3.8 - semver version observance:
semver | 2.0.0 - amount of gittip donations per week:
tips | $2/week
Since one of the major concerns is legibility, it's impossible to ignore how badges will render on retina (high DPI) displays.
As suggested by @kneath, badges displayed with an HTML image tag (instead of the easier Markdown image tag) can be given a fixed height to force an image that is actually double the resolution into a 50% smaller image, which will display properly for both retina and non-retina screens.
Here's an example with the following code:
<img src="https://raw.github.com/badges/shields/master/static/shields_white@2x.png" height="143" alt="Retina-ready Shields example" />
All our badges aren't yet compatible with this but we're working on updating them soon. Look for image filenames with @2x suffixes, those will be the pixel doubled versions.
Note: They were pixel doubled manually in Photoshop, not after the fact.
The font used on these badges is the Apache licensed Open Sans Regular available from Google Web Fonts.
Want to use one of these swanky badges for your own service right now and don't have time to open an issue and wait for us to help you out?
Well here's a hint, if you need to resize the badge yourself in Photoshop make sure you use the vector points like this.
In Illustrator, it's a little different (4.8 MB .mov video).
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
See LICENSE.md.